Socialcam launches. We dig in to see if it’s worth all of the hype.

With social photo sharing apps being all the rage lately, it’s no wonder that Socialcam has been so heavily talked about. Viral live video site Justin.tv has developed Socialcam to fill that void of social video sharing via mobile devices and, at first blush, things look to be very good.

Socialcam is an app for your Android or iOS device that lets you easily and quickly record video, then keep it within the Socialcam system or share it to your Facebook friends. This is the only part that annoys us, somewhat. Video recorded in Socialcam can’t really go much of anywhere else.

You can choose the Facebook share, but embedding the video anywhere else will require a bit of code-monkey tweaking that most users won’t want to do. The share options consist only of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or email, all of which essentially do nothing more than provide the link for your shared video page.

The real question, of course, is how the video looks. While it’s understandable that videos will be recorded in a fairly low setting, thus saving bandwidth for the upload and sharing, it’s a bit odd that Socialcam doesn’t appear to give you any choices in the video quality. With 4G networks becoming more common, we’d like to see some more options.

So does it have the juice to become an Instagram-popular app? Possibly. It seems that the push toward video from photos would be a natural one, but not many have seemed to have adopted the idea just yet. While doing real-time or even on-the-fly video effects isn’t something that most phones or sites are going to support just yet, those seem to be key features in why Instagram, PicPlz and the like have really taken off.

At the end of the day, it’s a free app that does what it says it does. The UI for sharing is passable, if not great, but the rest of the app is fun to use and browse around. Like any social service, it’s going to need to reach that critical mass point in order to really take off. So, doing our part, we thought you’d want to know about it. Want to give it a try? It’s a free download for your iPhone or Android, so you can’t really go wrong.